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1-15 September 2012 Cyber Attacks Timeline
Here it is the usual compilation for the Cyber Attacks in the first half of September, a period which has apparently confirmed the revamping of hacktivism seen in August.
Several operations such as #OpFreeAssange (in support of Julian Assange), #OpTPB2 against the arrest of The Pirate Bay Co-Founder Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, and #OpIndipendencia in Mexico have characterized the first half of September. Curiously the hacktivists have also characterized this period for a couple of controversial events: the alleged leak of 1 million of UDIDs from FBI (later proven to be fake) and the alleged attack to GoDaddy (later proven to be a network issue, that is the reason why I not even mentioned it in this timeline). Other actions motivated by hacktivists have been carried on by Pro-Syrian hackers.
From a Cyber Crime perspective, there are two events particularly interesting (even if well different): the alleged leak of Mitt Romney’s tax returns and yet another breach against a Bitcoin Exchange (Bitfloor), worthing the equivalent of 250,000 USD which forced the operator to suspend the operations.
If you want to have an idea of how fragile our data are inside the cyberspace, have a look at the timelines of the main Cyber Attacks in 2011 and 2012 and the related statistics (regularly updated), and follow @paulsparrows on Twitter for the latest updates.
Also, feel free to submit remarkable incidents that in your opinion deserve to be included in the timelines (and charts).
August 2012 Cyber Attacks Statistics
It’s time for the stats related to the Cyber Attacks Timeline of August. I do not remember a month so characterized by Hacktivism like this! The reason is mainly due to the actions motivated by the so-called OpFreeAssange, the waves of cyber attacks in favor of Julian Assange and, most of all in the first part of the month, to the OpDemonoid, the attacks targeting Ukrainan sites after the shutdown of the famous torrent tracker.
Let us begin with the Motivations Behind Attacks Chart. More than one half of the attacks of my sample (58%) were motivated by hacktivism, in line with the data of July (when the value was 55%). Cyber Crime motivated attacks rank at number two, with the 36% of occurrences, even in this case a value substantially in line with the previous month when it was at 31%. Cyber Espionage and Cyber Crime are well behind with the 3% respectively.
Moving forward to the chart regarding the Distribution Of Attack Techniques, there is a predominance of SQLi, which confirms to be the preferred weapon for Hacktivists or Cyber Criminals. DDoS (real or claimed) counts for nearly one third of the occurrence (32,4% real plus a further 2,9% claimed). Of Course, keep always in mind that data refer only to my sample and do not take into account all the defacements (make a jump to Zone-H and you will realize that is simply impossible) unless they are particularly meaningful.
Last but not least, the Distribution Of Targets chart clearly reflects the predominance of hacktivism in this month. In fact target belonging to governments rank at number one with the 19% of occurrences. Industries and organizations are immediately behind with respectively the 16.2% and the 15.2%. Inside industry, technology has been the most targeted sector, this is mainly due to the (controversial) Philips hack, but also to other remarkable cyber attacks such as AMD and AVX Corporation.
Of course, as usual, data must be taken very carefully since they do refer only to discovered attacks (the so-called tip of the iceberg), and hence do not pretend to be exhaustive but only aim to provide an high level overview of the “cyber landscape” of the considered period. Moreover, remember that the most dangerous threats are the invisible ones.
If you want to have an idea of how fragile our data are inside the cyberspace, have a look at the timelines of the main Cyber Attacks in 2011 and 2012 (regularly updated). Also have a look at the 2012 Cyber Attacks Statistics and follow @paulsparrows on Twitter for the latest updates.
Also, feel free to submit remarkable incidents that in your opinion deserve to be included in the timelines (and charts).
Related articles
- 1 – 15 August Cyber Attacks Statistics (hackmageddon.com)
- Several Small Enhancements to 2012 Cyber Attacks Statistics (hackmageddon.com)
16 – 31 August 2012 Cyber Attacks Timeline
Here the first part with the timeline from 1 to 15 August 2012.
Here we are with the second part of the August 2012 Cyber Attacks Timeline. A second part of the month that has been characterized by hacktivism, most of all because of the so-called OperationFreeAssange, which has targeted many high-profile websites.
Among the targets of the month, Philips has been particularly “unlucky”. The Dutch giant has been the victim of three Cyber Attacks, even if there are several doubts about the authenticity of the hacks.
But maybe the biggest operation of the month is the #ProjectHellFire, carried on by the collective @TeamGhostShell, that has unleashed something as 1 million of accounts belonging to different sectors (banks, government agencies, consulting firms, law enforcement and the CIA). And the group promises new action for this Fall and Winter.
The Middle East confirms to be very hot, with a new Cyber Attack, probably another occurrence of Shamoon, targeting RasGas, yet another Oil Company.
Just one note: of course it is impossible to track all the targets of the #OpFreeAssange. You can find a complete list at cyberwarnews.info.
If you want to have an idea of how fragile our data are inside the cyberspace, have a look at the timelines of the main Cyber Attacks in 2011 and 2012 and the related statistics (regularly updated), and follow @paulsparrows on Twitter for the latest updates.
Also, feel free to submit remarkable incidents that in your opinion deserve to be included in the timelines (and charts).
1 – 15 August Cyber Attacks Statistics
First of all, let me begin with great news: The Cyber Attacks Statistics page is complete with all the data collected so far: I created and inserted even the charts for January, so I am currently covering (and will cover) the whole 2012.
Now, after this small “self-gratification” it is time to look at the statistics derived from the Cyber Attacks Timeline for the first half of August. You will soon discover that this month has seen an (un)expected revamping of Hacktivism and consequently of his preferred weapon (DDoS), and preferred targets (governments). This is a consequence of the so-called OpDemonoid carried on by the Anonymous collective against the takedown of the famous Torrent Tracker (which in many ways reminded the most famous OpMegaUpload). But this is also a consequence of OpAustralia, the operation (successful since the law proposal is in standby) against the new Australian Internet Surveillance Law.
As far as the Motivations Behind Attacks are concerned, Hacktivism ranked at number on with nearly the 50% of the events. Cyber Crime ranked at number two (43%) while as usual Cyber Espionage and Cyber Warfare are well behind (but I wonder how many targeted attacks are acting in this moment, silent and undetected). It is interesting to notice the rise of events motivated by Cyber Espionage (three inside the interval taken into consideration): the Gauss Cyber Attack, the campaign against Saudi Aramco and the attacks against the Nepalese Government.
The winds of hacktivism have a clear influence even in the Distribution Of Attack Techniques which shows a new entry (as it were) at number one. Yes, in the first half of August the DDoS has overtaken the SQLi with nearly one third of the occurrences (31.9%) against the 21.3 of the latter. Only for the 17% of the attacks it has not been possible to identify with certainty the attack technique leveraged.
Clearly the hacktivism also influenced the Distribution Of Targets: nearly one cyber attack on five (among the sample considered), corresponding to the 21%, hit government targets. Targets belonging to the industry sector and to the news sector ranked at number two, both of them with the 13% of the occurrences. Apparently the first half of August has been particularly awful for the News Sector, thanks most of all to Thomson Reuters, that has been hacked three times in two weeks.
Again, I will never get tired of repeating that data must be taken very carefully since they do refer only to discovered attacks (the so-called tip of the iceberg), and hence do not pretend to be exhaustive but only aim to provide an high level overview of the “cyber landscape” of the considered period.
If you want to have an idea of how fragile our data are inside the cyberspace, have a look at the timelines of the main Cyber Attacks in 2011 and 2012 (regularly updated), and follow @paulsparrows on Twitter for the latest updates.
Also, feel free to submit remarkable incidents that in your opinion deserve to be included in the timelines (and charts).
August 2012 Cyber Attacks Timeline (Part I)
The first half of August has seen a revamping of Hacktivism, encouraged by the takedown of the famous Torrent Tracker Demonoid (and the consequent OpDemonoid targeting most of all Ukrainian sites), but also encouraged by OpAustralia, the wave of attacks against Australian Web Sites carried on against the Australian Internet Surveillance Law (apparently the latter operation was successful since the controversial law has been put on standby).
But Hacktivism was not the only “trend topic” for this period. The Middle East continues to be the cradle for unexpected cyber weapons threats. In August, two new occurrences of allegedly state sponsored malware: Gauss, a cyber-espionage tool targeting bank transaction, and Shamoon , a destructive malware targeting energy companies.
These are probably the most remarkable Cyber Events of this period, which has also seen a purported giant breach targeting Pearl.fr, a French e-commerce website whose 729,000 accounts, together with over 1 million bank transaction details, have been subtracted by hackers.
If you want to have an idea of how fragile our data are inside the cyberspace, have a look at the timelines of the main Cyber Attacks in 2011 and 2012 and the related statistics (regularly updated), and follow @paulsparrows on Twitter for the latest updates.
Also, feel free to submit remarkable incidents that in your opinion deserve to be included in the timelines (and charts).
Several Small Enhancements to 2012 Cyber Attacks Statistics
I wrote a small script to automate the parsing of the data collected in the Cyber Attacks Timelines. I am just verifying the data for January and February 2012 for which I did not publish any statistics. I was already able to classify the data for March 2012, whose results you can see in the Statistics page.
I also did a small exercise and tried to collect the distribution of targets for 2012. I know, I still miss the data of the first two months but I promise I will fill the gap very soon. In the meantime have a look at the graph and notice the impact of Cyber Crime. Of course the data for the single months can be viewed at the 2012 Cyber Attacks Statistics page.
If you want to have an idea of how fragile our data are inside the cyberspace, have a look at the timelines of the main Cyber Attacks in 2011 and 2012 (regularly updated), and follow @paulsparrows on Twitter for the latest updates.
Also, feel free to submit remarkable incidents that in your opinion deserve to be included in the timelines (and charts).
July 2012 Cyber Attacks Statistics
Here we are with the statistics from the Cyber Attack Timelines for the first and the second half of July 2012. The sample included 76 attacks which have been analyzed according the three familiar parameters: Motivations behind attacks, Distribution of attacks techniques and Distribution of targets.
Again, I will never get tired of repeating that data must be taken very carefully since they do refer only to discovered attacks (the so-called tip of the iceberg), and hence do not pretend to be exhaustive but only aim to provide an high level overview of the “cyber landscape” of the considered period. Moreover, remember that the most dangerous threats are the invisible ones.
As far as the Motivations Behind Attacks are concerned, July has confirmed the predominance of Cyber Crime, although it dropped down to 55% from 72% of the previous month. It is interesting to notice the corresponding growth of Hacktivism, from 18% in June to 32% in July. Although the number of (discovered) attacks motivated by Cyber Espionage is always low, this month their occurrences nearly doubled as a consequence of the events in the Middle East, that confirms to be a “hot area” for the Cyber Arena. Cyber Warfare is positioned at the bottom of the chart with a “poor” 4% of the occurrences.
The Distribution Of Attacks Techniques chart confirms that is getting harder and harder to recognize what the cyber crooks have leveraged to reach their goal. The percentage of the unknown attacks has grown from the 36% of June to the 45% of July. In any case, among the recognized attacks, SQL Injection ranks at number one with the 28% of possible occurrences. DDoS has confirmed his decreasing trend from 16% in June to 9% in July. Maybe the possible victims are learning to effectively defend themselves?
The Distribution of Targets chart confirms that targets belonging to industry are always on top of the preferences of Cyber Crooks with the 32% of occurrences, well above the 21% of the last month. Government targets confirmed their second place with the 15% of occurrences (were the 18% on July) followed by Online Services with the 10%. It is interesting to notice the low occurrences of incidents targeting Law Enforcement Agencies and Military Institutions. Maybe after the high number of cyber attacks suffered, they are learning to enforce adequate countermeasures.
If you want to have an idea of how fragile our data are inside the cyberspace, have a look at the timelines of the main Cyber Attacks in 2011 and 2012 (regularly updated), and follow @paulsparrows on Twitter for the latest updates.
Also, feel free to submit remarkable incidents that in your opinion deserve to be included in the timelines (and charts).
July 2012 Cyber Attacks Timeline (Part II)
Click here for Part I.
The Dog Days are nearly here. Weather forecast are announcing for Italy one of the hottest summers since 2003, and the same can be said for the Infosec temperature, although, July 2012 has been very different from the same month of 2011, which was deeply characterized by hacktvism.
Instead looks like that hacktivists have partially left the scene in favor of cyber criminals who executed several high profile breaches also in the second part of the month: Maplesoft, Gamigo, KT Corporation and Dropbox are the most remarkable victims of cyber-attacks, but also other important firms, even if with different scales, have been hit by (improvised) Cyber Criminals. One example for all? Nike who suffered a loss of $80,000 by a 25-year improvised hacker, who decided that exploiting a web vulnerability was the best way to acquire professional merchandise.
But probably the prize for the most “peculiar” cyber-criminal is completely deserved by Catherine Venusto, who successfully changed her sons’ grade for 110 times between 2011 and 2012.
As far as the Hacktivism is concerned, although we were not in the same condition of one year ago (a leak every day kept security away), this month has offered the massive leak of the Australian Provider AAPT, with 40 gb of data allegedly stolen by the Anonymous.
Last but not least, a special mention for the cyber espionage campaigns, that had an unprecedented growth in this month: Israel, Iran, Japan, the European Union and Canada, are only few of the victims. Iran gained also an unwelcome record, the first nation to be hit by a malware capable of blasting PC speakers with an AC/DC song…
If you want to have an idea of how fragile our data are inside the cyberspace, have a look at the timelines of the main Cyber Attacks in 2011 and 2012 and the related statistics (regularly updated), and follow @paulsparrows on Twitter for the latest updates.
Also, feel free to submit remarkable incidents that in your opinion deserve to be included in the timelines (and charts).
July 2012 Cyber Attacks Statistics (Part I)
Here we are with the statistics from the Cyber Attack Timeline for the first half of July 2012. The sample included 39 attacks which have been analyzed according the three familiar parameters: Motivations behind attacks, Distribution of attacks techniques and Distribution of targets.
As far as Motivations Behind Attacks are concerned, the first two weeks of July confirmed the trend of the last months: Cybercrime ranked at number one with nearly the 70% of the occurrences, well ahead hacktivism, at number two with the 23%. Cyber Warfare and Cyber Espionage are well behind with respectively the 5% and 3% of the attacks.
The Distribution Of Attack Techniques has shown, for the first half of July, a considerable number of attacks of unknown origin. As a matter of fact, in more than one half of the occurrences (53%) it has not been possible to track the attack technique used by cyber croockers, at least according to the available information. In all those cases in which it has been possible to track the attacks, the first half of July has seen an overtake of DDoS (18%) against SQL Injection (13%), although if one sums the total occurrences of SQL Injections (certain and claimed, the latter are characterized by a question mark in the chart), the total of SQLi is a remarkable 21%, slightly greater than DDoS). I had to modify this chart after I came across an article indicating an SQL Injection attack as the vector of the breach suffered by Nvidia.
The Distribution of Targets chart confirms the Industry at rank number one with the 38% of occurrences. In any case, if we do not consider the fragmentation of this category (I have dedicated an apposite chart to drill it down), Governments have confirmed to be the most vulnerable targets with the 10% of the occurrences, corresponding to the most vulnerable single category.
Amongst the single categories, Law Enforcement Agencies rank at number two with the 8% of occurrences, followed by Education targets, online forums and political organizations, each one of them with the 5% of occurrences.
Again, please notice that data must be taken very carefully since they do refer only to discovered attacks (the so-called tip of the iceberg), and hence do not pretend to be exhaustive but only aim to provide an high level overview of the “cyber landscape” of the considered period. Moreover, remember that the most dangerous threats are the invisible ones.
If you want to have an idea of how fragile our data are inside the cyberspace, have a look at the timelines of the main Cyber Attacks in 2011 and 2012 (regularly updated), and follow @paulsparrows on Twitter for the latest updates.
Also, feel free to submit remarkable incidents that in your opinion deserve to be included in the timelines (and charts).
June 2012 Cyber Attacks Statistics
As usual I aggregated the data from the Cyber Attack Timelines of June to provide some aggregated statistics. Data must be taken very carefully since they do refers only to discovered attacks (the so-called tip of the iceberg), and hence do not pretend to be exhaustive but only aim to provide an high level overview of the “cyber landscape” of the month. Moreover, remember that the most dangerous threats are the invisible ones, how I can easily verify thanks to the advanced malware detection campaigns I am performing in these hard days.
Let us start with the Motivations Behind Attacks chart. Cybercrime is undoubtedly on the rise and has reached the unprecedented percentage of 72%. On the other hand Summer seems to be a period of vacation for hacktivists, whose influence on the landscape fell down to 18%. As usual Cyber Warfare and Cyber Espionage are well behind respectively to 6% and 4%. But of course, this is only the tip of the iceberg. On the other hand, I would not expect a complex cyber espionage action to be easily uncovered, or worst, advertised on social media as it happens for (too) many actions allegedly motivated by cyber crime or hacktivism.
Moving to Distribution of Targets, shows a preference of cybercrookers for Industry targets (21%), immediately followed by Government targets (18%). Targets belonging to education sadly confirm their top position, and rank, even in June, at number three with the 8% of occurrences. Of course industry targets are hugely fragmented hence, if we consider each category singularly, it turns out that Governments are still the most vulnerable victims of cyber attacks.
Last but not least, the next chart: Distribution Of Attacks Techniques. Apparently is getting harder and harder to recognize the attack techniques leveraged to execute the reported cyber attacks. Anyway, in those cases where it has been possible to do it, SQL Injection steadily keeps on being the King of Hill. The smaller occurrence of DDoS attacks reflects the minor influence of hacktivism during this month, with account hijacking confirming to be one of the most dangerous vectors. When looking at defacements, consider that typically I do not take them into consideration in my timelines (they are really too many) unless they are executed against very remarkable targets, hence consider that 3% belonging to what I defined high profile defacements.
If you want to have an idea of how fragile our data are inside the cyberspace, have a look at the timelines of the main Cyber Attacks in 2011 and 2012 (regularly updated), and follow @paulsparrows on Twitter for the latest updates.
Also, feel free to submit remarkable incidents that in your opinion deserve to be included in the timelines (and charts).
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08/13/2011 - My Post on Android Malware Mentioned on Engadget.
04/14/2011 - The Article Smart Grid: L'ultima Frontiera del Cybercrime published on ICT Security Magazine May 2011.
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02/14/2011 - The Article Gears of Cyberwar published on ICT Security Magazine January 2011.
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